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  • 3 months ago
'A Real Pain' writer and star Jesse Eisenberg chats during The Hollywood Reporter Writers Roundtable and discusses his process when writing for 'A Real Pain' and how he wanted the story to feel "real" and "artful."
Transcript
00:00I don't write in final draft.
00:02I write in emails because I never want to feel like this thing is official
00:06until I know it's good and that it feels full
00:09and that it feels like something I want to do.
00:11And so I'm always writing basically with the idea that no one will ever read this
00:16and it kind of just relieves the pressure of it has to be this page count
00:19and this font and all the official stuff that makes me feel like the thing is not artful
00:23or personal.
00:25And so I kind of write that way.
00:27But with this script, after I finished it, I thought I had these pictures
00:32from when I went to Poland with my wife in 2008
00:34and the pictures happened to be on the sets that we ultimately filmed at
00:38and I put the pictures in the back of the script to give the feeling a little bit
00:42to the reader of the reality of the thing
00:45and I also put all the music that I wanted to be in the movie
00:48in the various scenes that I wanted to play.
00:51And so after I finished the script and I knew this felt personal and real
00:56and artful and not engineered or, you know, reverse engineered or anything
01:00to affect some kind of, you know, emotion or whatever,
01:03I put in those little signposts so that readers can at least feel
01:07that this thing is very personal.
01:08And that was kind of a calculated decision,
01:11but only insofar as it helped people understand how kind of real it was.
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